Greek's Phase Run Pathfinder Heist Strategies

Greek

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Heist Overview

While you usually won’t find a guide within a guide because of the nature of this build, I decided to add this section to explain the way I typically progress my Heist character. This guide will not explain the basics of Heist so if you are brand new to the mechanic I suggest checking out our Heist guide here.

In this guide, we are going to go over the different strategies you can employ to have a smooth League Start and Heist experience. This guide will go over leveling to 90, farming gold inside of heist, where our money comes from, and lastly, enchanted contracts/blueprints, and how we can utilize them.

Leveling With Huck (~67-85)

As mentioned in previous pages, we are not killing Kitava in Act X until level 90. This is to make it easier to cap resistances at the price of two skill points. This saves us time and currency for when we do our major gear swap. However, this means we need a way to get to level 90 without touching maps. This is where Huck comes in!

Huck’s Experience Buff

The big reason we are using Huck to help us level is that he gives us a baseline 20% increased experience buff, along with some other combat benefits when he casts Combat Ready. This will allow us to quickly level up to 85 with contracts and blueprints that Huck can do.

Huck Passive Buff

Huck's Combat Ready Buff

What Contracts Can Huck do?

Huck Equipment Page

Huck can do a wide variety of contracts and blueprints; Such as Lockpicking, Brute Force, Demolition, and Engineering. I have supplied a regex below to search your stash, rogue locker, or async trade windows:

bru.*[1-3]|mol.*[1-3]|eeri.*[1-3]|kp.*[1-3]

Obtaining Contracts for Huck

Since we aren’t out in maps ourselves, we need to get our contracts and blueprints from trade or Whakano, the Barber. We want to use contracts from Whakano (level 67 contracts) until we are level 71. This allows us to continue to get reveals we can use on blueprints later, with minimal cost to us. After level 71, we can only do level 68+ contracts if we want to get reveals, while we can still always fallback to level 67 contracts if we run low on gold or currency. We also want to keep the level band of contracts we are doing around 3-5 levels lower than us, this will make them easier to clear and minimize the risk of deaths.

Unfortunately, trade can be cumbersome to acquire contracts. The best way I have found to acquire the contracts is to use the following Trade Filters Pictures below.

Type Filters

Heist Filters

Miscellaneous Filters

Trade Filters

Other Filter Settings

A few things you can change to narrow or alter searches is under are the following:

  • Type Filters: Change Item Rarity to Normal. This will save us from needing to scour any contracts and save us some gold.
  • Heist Filters: Can change Lockpicking, Brute Force, and/or Engineering Max to 0. This will force Demolition contracts, which are ideal for money.
  • Miscellaneous: You want to set this from a minimum of 68, but you want to increase that minimum to 5 levels below you and the maximum to about 3 levels below you. You can broaden to as wide as 5 levels below and above you.
  • Trade Filters: Buyout Price can be changed if you only want to buy with a certain type of currency. I.E. Orb of Alchemy Orb of Alchemy, Chaos Orb Chaos Orb or Orb of Chance Orb of Chance
  • Swapping to In-Person Trading: This can help if you end up running low on gold, since async trade has a gold free, but in-person does not.

Running the Contracts.

Now that we have obtained our contracts and know why Huck is so great, let’s go over how we run these contracts.

Our main goal from level 68-88 is to gain experience and some baseline currency. So we will prioritize killing as many enemies as possible while opening up ideal rooms. While the Lockdown stage technically spawns infinite monsters, they give degrading experience after the first wave and eventually give zero experience, so we won’t be sticking around to farm mobs during Lockdown past the first wave as we leave.

Note: Magic and Rare monsters give way more experience than Normal monsters. You should focus on clearing this. While all experience is good, we don’t need to clear every single mob. You can also skip super tanky rares and unique mobs if you feel it is taking too long to kill them.

Demolition Contracts

Demolition Contracts can spawn 4 exclusive types of rooms. We will focus on them in this order:

  1. ? aka Generic
  2. Blight
  3. Small Chest (these are the chests located along the Heist)
  4. Delirium
  5. Maps (This replaced Ultimatum Chest as of 3.29)

Lockpicking Contracts

Lockpicking Contracts can spawn 3 exclusive types of rooms. We will focus on them in this order:

  1. Currency
  2. Fragments
  3. Small Chest (these are the chests located along the Heist)
  4. Accessories

Brute Force Contracts

Brute Force Contracts can spawn 2 exclusive types of rooms. We will focus on them in this order:

  1. Uniques
  2. Small Chest (these are the chests located along the Heist)
  3. Weapons

Engineering Contracts

Engineering Contracts can spawn 3 exclusive types of rooms. We will focus on them in this order:

  1. Essence
  2. Uniques
  3. Small Chest (these are the chests located along the Heist)
  4. Maps

Farming Gold In Heists (85-90 or as needed)

Gold in Heists can be a bit lacking without farming specific strategies. The strategies we will utilize are Trap Disarmament blueprints with Vinderi. Trap Disarmament is the only skill type that has a chance to spawn a gold reward room, which we then pair with Vinderi’s passive. This gives us a chance to duplicate the Heist Chest at the cost of raiding the alert level (Pictured Below).

Vinderi Passive

To find these, we will search for Non-Unique Blueprints with at least level 1 Trap Disarmament with trade. Before you buy the Blueprint, you can hold Alt to see what reward rooms are available and unlocked(pictured below). Depending on your patience, you have a couple of options.

Blueprint Alt Hover

  • Option A is the cheap but cumbersome option: We keep jumping hideout, looking at all blueprints available, and only buying contracts with at least 1 Gold reward room unlocked.
  • Option B is a bit more expensive and still a bit cumbersome: We jump between hideouts of available trades and buy any contracts with 5 gold room rewards. Then we reveal the wings that contain the gold rooms and the gold rooms themselves. This has the downside of costing many rogue markers. You can run a few deception contracts with Gianna to help curb the cost of Wing reveals.

Gold Room Blueprint
This Blueprint netted me around ~102,000 gold

  • Option C is the most expensive in terms of gold/blueprint purchased, but is less cumbersome: Buy trap disarmament blueprints, reveal gold rooms if they are available in the first wing, and run them. This will certainly make you currency but might take a bit longer to build up gold.

To search for all trap disarmament blueprints in an async trade window, stash, or rogue locker, you can use the following regex:

blueprint sar

Why are we farming gold?

We have two main reasons we need to farm gold. Reason 1 is to sustain us buying from the market, as every contract and blueprint we buy cost use gold. Reason 2 is preparing for our giant respec into the Speed Heist Setup. This will cost ~750k Gold if we don’t use any regrets or free campaign respecs. To figure out exactly how much gold you need, use the following formula:

750000-8450(20+# Orbs of Regret)= Gold Needed to Respec at level 90

We get 20 free respecs from the Campaign. I suggest going back and grabbing any of them that you missed. Here are the generally skipped passive points given to us during Acts:

  • Act 1: A Dirty Job (clear the Fetid Pool)
  • Act 9: Fastis Fortuna (retrieve the Calendar of Fortune in The Foothills from Boulderback)
  • Act 10: No Love for Old Ghost (Find Elixir of Allure in the Ossuary)

Making Currency!

You have finally made it, you are level 90, you have swapped out your gear, made your respecs, and are ready to put all that speed to good use! We are going to go over a few different strategies you can now do with your build.

Which Reward Rooms to Open

Below is the priority in which it is considered optimal to open reward rooms:

  1. ? aka Generic
  2. Currency
  3. Gems
  4. Gold
  5. Essence
  6. Fragments
  7. Blight
  8. Uniques
  9. Accessories
  10. Delirium
  11. Maps
  12. Armor
  13. Weapons

While this list is optimized to give you the most currency for your alert level, if you are finding certain chests to be less rewarding than others, feel free to make your own priority list.

Blueprint Heist Targets

Unlike in contracts, we get to choose 1 of 5 items from the end of each blueprint wing. Here, I’m going to go over the different types of items that can come from Blueprints and some strategies to learn what is valuable.

Currency

This one is pretty easy. Divines and Chaos are easy to value. The other big drops from currency are Tailoring Orb Tailoring Orb and Tempering Orb Tempering Orb. These are decently common and will trend upward in value as the league goes on. If you get these in the first few weeks and don’t need the money right was I suggest holding onto these. Other currencies to consider grabbing if nothing of value is available are Orb of Scouring Orb of Scouring, as we want to run most of our contracts. Normal to minimize risk, we tend to run through these quite often.

Thieves’ Trinkets

These are generally low-value items that don’t do much for your loot. While having one is better than not, there isn’t a ton of value you get from these. Some notable lines to look out for are Regal to Divine and Chaos to Divine Trinkets. These don’t have super high chances of converting the currency, but it is nice when it happens.

Experiment Items

These items can vary greatly in price depending on ilvl, which can fluctuate even when running only ilvl 83 Blueprints. If you are running enchanted contracts for these item I suggest only doing this on ilvl 83 Blueprints for best results. Below is a list of items that generally hold good value:

While this list isn’t all-inclusive, these are all items you should be on the lookout for!

Enchanted Armaments

These items are enchanted rare gear that holds an enchant that is the result of using a Tailoring Orb Tailoring Orb or a Tempering Orb Tempering Orb. While these items are sometimes valuable, this is more the exception than the rule. More likely, these items are valuable because they are a 6-link in the early parts of a league. This can be a good source for a 6-link for our build if you feel you need more damage over using the sudo 5-link from The Embalmer The Embalmer.

Replica Unique Items

This is probably the largest learning curve when running Heists. The best way I can suggest learning the value of this vast catalogue of unique options is just by looking up all of the available options. While this might seem to be annoying at first, learning which unique items are valuable from a glance will just take some time.

Here are some of the more valuable ones to watch out for:

We also want a Replica Karui Ward Replica Karui Ward at some point for our own build. If you don’t want to purchase one, you can generally self-farm one fairly quickly.

Single Wing Blueprints

Get in and get out is this strategy. We purchase as many blueprints as we can get our hands on, and we run to the end, grab the End Reward, and Get Out. This strategy is a bit gold-intensive but can work well early to get profit without the need to farm reveals or very many rogue markers.

Reveal your own Blueprints

In this method, we grab a good amount of blueprints and reveal each wing with Gianna’s reveals. This method has a bit of a windup. You first need to grab as many contracts for Gianna as you can and speed run them. Deception is usually the preferred contract for this, due to the lack of doors during the lockdown to bar you from leaving. Gianna can also do level 2 perception and level 3 counter-thaumaturgy.

For reward rooms to reveal, I would suggest using Whakano to cut back on the number of reveals you need to farm out with Gianna. I would also only reveal your highest 3-4 priority rooms (See list above). You might also consider revealing exits closer to the Heist target, as this can speed up your clears.

After you have these reveal you grab your reward rooms and the Heist target of each wing and repeat. This method is a bit slower but has extremely consistent income.

For Gianna contracts, here is a regex you can use. This will highlight all deception contracts for you:

contract dece

Buy Fully Revealed Blueprints

This is my personal favorite method, but it does have a decent upfront cost. We are going to buy blueprints which are already revealed. What we lose in cost we save in time. We do not need to farm Gianna reveals, rogue markers, and don’t need to manually reveal wings or reward rooms because the blueprints are already revealed for us. This occurs because of the atlas node casing the Joint (pictured below), and many people farm these while mapping. These generally cost quite a bit more than a normal blueprints, but they do allow us to grab reward rooms and final targets without ever having to really stop.

Casing the Joint Atlas Passive

Enchanted Contracts and Blueprints

Enchanted Contracts and Blueprints were removed with Sextants in 3.24, but made a return with 3.28 Mirage League. Now in 3.29, Enchanted Blueprints are going core to the Atlas! This is great news for us, Heist farmers. These Blueprints can give huge value, but they are generally priced high because of this. This section will cover some of the Blueprint enchants to avoid and seek.

Contracts

Unfortunately, the new node being added to the Atlas in 3.29 only allows for Blueprints to be Enchanted. We will not have access to the enchanted contracts found in 3.28.

Blueprints

Blueprint enchants are not all equal. Here is a list of the blueprints and the ups and downs@

  • Heist Targets are always Currency and Scarabs: Great for consistent money and returns on investment. They are generally fairly priced to give you pretty good returns in the form of divines from End-Heist Rewards.
  • Heist Targets are always Thieves’ Trinkets: This is almost always a downside and is generally not worth running.
  • Heist Targets are always Experimented Items: This is the biggest gamble enchant, while you will generally break even with these, you aren’t really making money until you hit items like Simplex Amulet Simplex Amulet, Focused Amulet Focused Amulet or Helical Ring Helical Ring
  • Heist Targets are always Enchanted Armaments: This can be a decent way to fish for 6-links in the first week of the league, but generally doesn’t have much value past that.
  • Heist Targets are always Replica Unique Items: These are generally very good early, but fall off as the league goes on. While they can still make great money, the average replica item is not worth very much, allowing for dry streaks.

Rogue Gear

While rogue gear is covered in the main heist guide, I wanted to add a quick note on the importance of rogue gear. We will be moving extremely fast in heists, and the only thing that will slow us down is the doors that our Heist party needs to open. This means Job Speed is an extremely important stat. I would highly recommend getting as much job speed as you can on each piece of heist equipment.

Also note that once you have received all the heist gear you need, you can make more to sell to other Heisters. This is a good option if you like to do a bit of profit crafting.

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